This week I was able to get up to the barn about four times, and we worked on a lot of things. At the beginning of the week, I really focused on perfecting clockwise circles with Merlin because he tends to be more difficult when riding in that direction (most likely because of his training on the track when he was younger). As the week progressed, he showed great improvement on his clockwise circles, so we moved on and started trotting over ground poles. At first he was very clumsy when going over them, but he eventually started to get the hang of it towards the end of day two. While these exercises are very simple, they seem to help him improve on his motor skills (which he struggled with when I first bought him due to the condition he came to me in). They also help in the basic building of muscles along the flank and topline.

While I have been working with him fairly consistently, his body shape has hardly changed over the last week. This is not necessarily a bad thing though because horses take time to lose weight and build muscle mass in the same way that humans do. If you look closely, you can see that his ribs are starting to show and that his stomach is starting to appear less round, which is perfectly normal for thoroughbreds. This upcoming week I plan to do more work with ground poles with him as well as to reintroduce him to cantering to help him build up his stamina and endurance, to keep him engaged in his training, and to help continue developing and defining his muscles.